4+ day, 3+ hour ago   (415+ words) A NASA telescope in early development should be able to detect light bouncing off the surface of oceans on alien planets, vital information in the hunt for alien life. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is currently earmarked for launch in the…...

1+ mon, 3+ day ago   (657+ words) We have found tantalising hints that not only was there once life on Mars, but that it might still exist on the Red Planet. Now, a study here on Earth has made that idea more plausible by showing that salt-loving,…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (77+ words) We still don’t know how black holes get so big | Becky Smethurst New Scientist Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicst at the University of Oxford and her work looks at how these behemoths affect the galaxy around them. New Scientist‘s…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (1027+ words) Order and chaos. Nature and nurture. Yin and yang. We are fond of carving the world into two. And physics, at first, seems to oblige. Take the universe’s unruly zoo of fundamental particles and it seems to fall into two…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (147+ words) “Physics is the antagonist” in Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods New Scientist The New Scientist Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a…...

2+ mon, 4+ day ago   (148+ words) New Scientist From Bruce Denness, Niton, Isle of Wight, UK The distribution of the 100-odd moons in the newly discovered Mundilfari group around Saturn reminds me of the distribution of individual shots on the paper target sheets I used to…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (285+ words) The question of how gravity interacts with the quantum world has long perplexed physicists, but a non-quantum theory of space-time could present an answer Time may be more wobbly than we thoughtmavrixpixels/Shutterstock Most of the proposed ideas to combine…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (563+ words) A proposed technique to counter global warming by spraying sun-reflecting particles near the poles would cause commercial flights to pass through clouds of sulphuric acid, posing a danger to passengers and crew Commercial airliners could pass through clouds of sulphuric…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (860+ words) Astronomers have recently started looking for black holes bigger than galaxies. Brian Lacki explains how these “stupendously large black holes” might be used by alien civilisations, and what makes them such an intriguing possibility By Matt von Hippel No black…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (450+ words) The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is beginning its extraordinary survey of the southern sky, which will use the largest camera ever built to map the solar system, the galaxy and beyond A field of stars in the constellation Lupus…...